"A lot of Buddhist texts, when they talk about the knowledge you gain from meditation, express it in the form of vision, something you see. You're working toward knowledge and vision, they say. The first experience of Awakening is the opening of the Dhamma Eye.

Full Awakening comes with knowledge and vision of things as they have come to be. But there are also passages that describe this knowledge as something sensed not through the inner eye, but through the body. All the teachings about jhana are concerned with gaining a sense of ease and wellbeing from the breath and then allowing it to permeate the whole body.

Some of the texts talk about 'touching' the various formless dimensions that can be accessed through jhana, touching them with your body. One of the texts says that those who practice jhana touch the deathless with the body. And one of the verses in the Dhammapada says you see the Dhamma with the body. The Sutta Nipata describes the Buddha as the All-Around Eye: His whole body was an organ of vision, an organ of sight."

"He, the Blessed One, is indeed the Noble Lord, the Perfectly Enlightened One;He is impeccable in conduct and understanding, the Serene One, the Knower of the Worlds;He trains perfectly those who wish to be trained; he is Teacher of gods and men; he is Awake and Holy. "--------------------------------------------"The Dhamma is well-expounded by the Blessed One, Apparent here and now, timeless, encouraging investigation, Leading to liberation, to be experienced individually by the wise. "

"The Buddha treated his students like adults. If he had wanted to, he could have told them about all the amazing and wonderful things that he had learned during his awakening, and that they should simply obey him without question. But instead, he taught them how to question, how to think for themselves, how to gain awakening themselves. Even when he was teaching children he taught them adult things, or basically how to become adults. The Novice Questions, for instance, start out with the big harsh fact of life: that all beings subsist on food. This fact is also the main proof against the idea of intelligent design. If there were intelligent design, we could all live off the dew every morning, the rain every evening. We wouldn't have to harm anyone else in keeping our bodies going. But this is a fact of life: we have a body that need to be fed; we have to eat.

When we eat, there's suffering, even if we're very strict vegetarians. The farmers who have to clear the fields and plant the food, the animals who die when the fields are cleared, the people who have to transport the food once it's grown: A lot of work and misery goes into that. So when the Buddha introduced the topic of causality to children, he started with a harsh fact of life. This is your prime experience of causality: Feeding goes on all the time. Without it, life couldn't last.

When he taught his young son, Rahula, about truthfulness, the teaching was also pretty harsh. If you feel no shame in telling a lie, he said, your goodness is empty. It's thrown away. You can't be trusted. Then he taught Rahula to apply truthfulness in looking at his actions, to learn from his actions. That is basically what it means to become an adult. When you do something, you notice what actually happens as a result, and then you learn from it. If your actions harmed yourself or others, you resolve not to repeat that mistake. Then you remember to apply that lesson to your next action, and then the next. That's what mindfulness is for: to remember these lessons. As the Buddha says, this is how your purify your thoughts, words, and deeds."

"He, the Blessed One, is indeed the Noble Lord, the Perfectly Enlightened One;He is impeccable in conduct and understanding, the Serene One, the Knower of the Worlds;He trains perfectly those who wish to be trained; he is Teacher of gods and men; he is Awake and Holy. "--------------------------------------------"The Dhamma is well-expounded by the Blessed One, Apparent here and now, timeless, encouraging investigation, Leading to liberation, to be experienced individually by the wise. "

"People sometimes complain that the Buddha focuses an awful lot on suffering. That's because he has a cure. If you had a cure for suffering, wouldn't you want to talk about it too? The people who are afraid to talk about suffering: they're the ones who don't have a cure. They always try to cover things up, pretend it's not really that bad a situation: 'This is the ordinary life that everybody lives, this is as good as it gets - so you might as well enjoy it, make the best of it.' That's desperation.

The Buddha wasn't desperate. He was coming from a position of total freedom. He said, 'Look, if you really sit down and with the proper tools and the proper approach try to discern suffering, get to the point where you really comprehend it, and let go, you've solved all your problems in life.'

So, who's pessimistic and who's optimistic? We might say that the Buddha's realistic, but realistic in a way that sees through all the problems the mind creates for itself. Once the mind isn't creating any more problems for itself, you're free to go wherever you like.

At that point, the Buddha said, he had nothing more to teach. This is the basic issue: suffering and the end of suffering. Once you comprehend both sides of the Buddha's teachings, what suffering is and how it can be brought to an end, and you directly experience the end of suffering, you've finished the Buddha's teachings. As they say: 'The Holy Life is completed. The task is done.' There's nothing left for you to do. At that point you can live out the rest of your life in total freedom."

"He, the Blessed One, is indeed the Noble Lord, the Perfectly Enlightened One;He is impeccable in conduct and understanding, the Serene One, the Knower of the Worlds;He trains perfectly those who wish to be trained; he is Teacher of gods and men; he is Awake and Holy. "--------------------------------------------"The Dhamma is well-expounded by the Blessed One, Apparent here and now, timeless, encouraging investigation, Leading to liberation, to be experienced individually by the wise. "

"People often think that the Buddha gave desire bad press, but he actually gave it a central role in the path. It's right there in right effort: Generate desire to give rise to skillful qualities, generate desire to abandon unskillful ones. In other words, the best way to do this is to get yourself to want to do it, so that it's not just a mechanical process of following somebody's orders. You have to find ways of encouraging yourself and inspiring yourself on the path.

That's how you develop your wisdom, how you develop your discernment, motivating yourself to realize that this really is a worthwhile project to pursue. Even though lots of people might say, 'What could you possibly learn just by focusing on the breath?' you realize that staying focused here exercises your mindfulness, your concentration, your discernment, all the qualities you're going to need to solve this problem of suffering. These are the qualities that allow you to test the Buddha's claim that by solving the problem of suffering, you solve the biggest problem in life. You actually arrive at the deathless, a happiness that doesn't change, that lies outside of space and time.

It's quite a claim, but can you think about what life would be like if there were no happiness lying outside space and time. Whatever you gained, you'd have to lose it; you'd gain it again, you'd lose it again. What real satisfaction is there in that? But here's the Buddha, someone who seems reasonable, claiming that it is possible to find a happiness that doesn't have to depend on conditions. And it's up to you to decide: Do you want to make the effort to explore that possibility?"

"He, the Blessed One, is indeed the Noble Lord, the Perfectly Enlightened One;He is impeccable in conduct and understanding, the Serene One, the Knower of the Worlds;He trains perfectly those who wish to be trained; he is Teacher of gods and men; he is Awake and Holy. "--------------------------------------------"The Dhamma is well-expounded by the Blessed One, Apparent here and now, timeless, encouraging investigation, Leading to liberation, to be experienced individually by the wise. "

Ajahn Geoff spoke of a monk in Ajahn Chah's sangha that had his mood ruined by a gossiping monk with whom the monk had taken a walk. Returning to the temple in a bad mood, the monk passed Ajahn Chah, who, for the first time, smiled at him and said in English, "Good morning." The monk then felt elated and decided that he would massage Ajahn Chah's feet that morning while the other monks were chanting.

The monk was then at Ajahn Chah's feet, massaging his teacher's soles, and listening to the other monks chanting in Pali in the background. The monk remarked to Ajahn Chah that he had never felt so happy.

Ajahn Chah then booted him with his free foot, in the monk's chest. "D not let the circumstances of life and the actions of others determine your state of mind." To summarize, Ajahn Geoff then spoke of how we can use meditation to settle the mind, and free if of the tendency to let the statements and actions of others to determine our mood.

"Be mindful of speech, yours and that of others. Speech must be examined as to its truth and its benefit."

Thanissaro Bhikkhu started the pre-alms meal talk with chanting in Pali with a large community of Thai and farang today. He then told the above teaching in English, and then told the same teaching in perfect Thai....Amazing.

"If you look at Buddhist history, you see that wherever the Dhamma goes, people find all kinds of ways of trying to divert the teaching to other purposes, forgetting that its original purpose was the most compassionate: showing the way out of suffering. Our imagination is so tied up with the normal way of using connectedness or interdependence that it really has trouble negotiating that compassionate use.

This is why the path is so hard: It goes against the grain. If anything calls into question the idea of an intelligent designer or a compassionate designer, it's the fact that the quest for the end to suffering, the quest for true and lasting happiness, goes so much against the grain of the human mind. Keep that in mind as you practice. And because the path requires working with tools that normally fit into another purpose - the survival of the body - it's very easy for us to get off track.

You have to keep in mind the fact that deep down inside your deepest desire is a desire for happiness, a happiness that's not going to change on you, a happiness that's not going to leave you in a lurch, a happiness that doesn't have to involve other suffering. That was the desire the Buddha respected within himself, and respected within other people as well."

"He, the Blessed One, is indeed the Noble Lord, the Perfectly Enlightened One;He is impeccable in conduct and understanding, the Serene One, the Knower of the Worlds;He trains perfectly those who wish to be trained; he is Teacher of gods and men; he is Awake and Holy. "--------------------------------------------"The Dhamma is well-expounded by the Blessed One, Apparent here and now, timeless, encouraging investigation, Leading to liberation, to be experienced individually by the wise. "

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:Ajaan Maha Boowa makes the point that when the defilements are named in the books they come in nice, neat lists, but when they come up in your mind they don't follow the lists. They don't come in the proper order. They come all pell-mell, so you have to be ready to deal with them pell-mell, whatever the order they come in. As in that question the king of Thailand once asked Luang Puu Dune: "Which defilement do you have to deal with first?" Luang Puu's answer was, "Whichever one arises first." Sometimes there are going to be subtle ones and sometimes blatant ones. They don't line up neatly.

So, again, it's good to have names for the defilements to get a sense of what you might be dealing with, but be prepared for the fact that a lot of what's going to happen in your mind won't quite be the way it's described in the books. Ajaan Lee once commented that the ways of the mind are so many that no book on earth could possibly cover them all. But fortunately there are certain basic patterns you learn from, and you try applying them. Then when you've run through your list of skills and patterns, and you find that things are still not working, you've got to use your ingenuity and try new approaches.From: What's Not on the Map by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

"Look at the Buddha. Even after his Awakening, he spent 45 years establishing the teaching, the Dhamma and the Vinaya. It took a lot of work. And he didn't do it with a apathetic attitude, thinking, 'I don't care whether it works or not.' He put in a lot of effort into making it a teaching that would last. He noticed that some people would take the teaching and use it to a good purpose, but didn't let himself get elated about that. There were people who listened but then didn't really put it to any good use. He knew how not to get depressed about that.

He had established mindfulness in such a way that he did what needed to be done. Of course, he preferred to do a good job of teaching. But as for the results that came, how other people took the teaching, that's where he developed the mind that was like earth, water, fire, and wind. He did his best, but as far as other people would take what he did, he learned how to put that aside. So apathy has no place in the teaching..."

"He, the Blessed One, is indeed the Noble Lord, the Perfectly Enlightened One;He is impeccable in conduct and understanding, the Serene One, the Knower of the Worlds;He trains perfectly those who wish to be trained; he is Teacher of gods and men; he is Awake and Holy. "--------------------------------------------"The Dhamma is well-expounded by the Blessed One, Apparent here and now, timeless, encouraging investigation, Leading to liberation, to be experienced individually by the wise. "

"When the texts describe the insight that leads to the first stage of Awakening, they express it as seeing this: All that's subject to origination is subject to cessation. That's an insight both into change and into casual connections underlying change. The Pali word for 'origination', samudaya, refers to the way things arise together with their causes. As you go deeper into the meditation, this insight grows deeper and becomes more all-encompassing, but it starts with precisely this act of adjusting: changing your perceptions and intentions a little bit here, a little bit there, seeing what feeling results, and trying to be observant as possible, as sensitive as possible, to what's really happening, to what's connected with what.

This is why you're told not to force the breath, but to allow it to come in and go out comfortably and then to monitor it to see what feels best. Learn to listen to things as they come into being. This was characteristic of the Buddha as he sought Awakening: to see things as they come into being. He didn't try blindly to force things in line with a lot of preconceived notions. He was more of an explorer, trying different approaches and seeing what results came about. Ultimately he found what worked best in the sense of putting an end to all suffering and then recommended that method for us to follow. He set out all the basic principles but left the details for us to observe for ourselves in our laboratory right here: the body sitting here, breathing in and out."

"He, the Blessed One, is indeed the Noble Lord, the Perfectly Enlightened One;He is impeccable in conduct and understanding, the Serene One, the Knower of the Worlds;He trains perfectly those who wish to be trained; he is Teacher of gods and men; he is Awake and Holy. "--------------------------------------------"The Dhamma is well-expounded by the Blessed One, Apparent here and now, timeless, encouraging investigation, Leading to liberation, to be experienced individually by the wise. "

"Back when I was first ordained, Ajaan Fuang had me memorize the Divine Mantra, which, I must admit, struck me as kind of strange, as it centered on the six elements, a way of looking at things that felt very foreign. He had me chant it every evening. I was living alone up on the hill in Rayong, and would chant the Divine Mantra every evening just after dusk. After doing this for a while it became less of a weird aspect of Thai Buddhism and more of a friend as I sat there through the night, all by myself.

Finally, one evening it really hit me. I was going through the six elements, and when I finally got to the chant on consciousness I realized that I wasn't chanting about some foreign, abstract idea of consciousness. I was chanting about my own awareness, my own mind, my own heart, right here, right now. I felt as if a huge block of ice inside me just shattered. I was able to open up and realize that the meditation wasn't some strange foreign thing I was doing to myself. I hadn't consciously thought that it was, but subconsciously, deep down inside, there was a feeling that it was alien, something from another culture. That night it became mine: my awareness of my mind, my awareness of things really deep inside. The Dhamma was no longer a foreign mold that I was trying to impose on the mind. It became a message pointing to my deepest awareness. And I became aware of a real tenderness deep down - a tenderness not in the sense of being nice or fuzzy, but in the sense of having been wounded, of needing some help. There was a need for some healing there, and the meditationwas what it needed."

"He, the Blessed One, is indeed the Noble Lord, the Perfectly Enlightened One;He is impeccable in conduct and understanding, the Serene One, the Knower of the Worlds;He trains perfectly those who wish to be trained; he is Teacher of gods and men; he is Awake and Holy. "--------------------------------------------"The Dhamma is well-expounded by the Blessed One, Apparent here and now, timeless, encouraging investigation, Leading to liberation, to be experienced individually by the wise. "

"The Buddha's strategy in teaching us to let is to give us better and better things to hold onto. For example, he gets you to hold onto states of good concentration. Then when you turn around and look at things that would normally incite your lust, your anger, your desire or passion, you realize that they're not worth it. You'd much rather hold onto the stillness, the state of satisfaction, the state of wellbeing that comes with your concentration.

So you burn your bridges behind you and hold onto concentration as your only true happiness in life. Only then, when the Buddha has you cornered like that, does he have you think of the drawbacks not only of things you've already left behind but also of the concentration you're holding onto.

Only when you see the drawbacks of concentration can you realize that the only alternative is the Deathless. The only thing that would really appeal to you at that point is the Deathless. That's when the door opens."

"He, the Blessed One, is indeed the Noble Lord, the Perfectly Enlightened One;He is impeccable in conduct and understanding, the Serene One, the Knower of the Worlds;He trains perfectly those who wish to be trained; he is Teacher of gods and men; he is Awake and Holy. "--------------------------------------------"The Dhamma is well-expounded by the Blessed One, Apparent here and now, timeless, encouraging investigation, Leading to liberation, to be experienced individually by the wise. "

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:What's striking about the Buddha's standard for wisdom is how direct and down to earth it is. This might come as a surprise, for most of us don't think of Buddhist wisdom as so commonsensical and straightforward. Instead, the phrase "Buddhist wisdom" conjures up teachings more abstract and paradoxical, flying in the face of common sense — emptiness being a prime example. Emptiness, we're told, means that nothing has any inherent existence. In other words, on an ultimate level, things aren't what we conventionally think of as "things." They're processes that are in no way separate from all the other processes on which they depend. This is a philosophically sophisticated idea that's fascinating to ponder, but it doesn't provide much obvious help in getting you up early on a cold morning to meditate nor in convincing you to give up a destructive addiction.

For example, if you're addicted to alcohol, it's not because you feel that the alcohol has any inherent existence. It's because, in your calculation, the immediate pleasure derived from the alcohol outweighs the long-term damage it's doing to your life. This is a general principle: attachment and addiction are not metaphysical problems. They're tactical ones. We're attached to things and actions, not because of what we think they are, but because of what we think they can do for our happiness. If we keep overestimating the pleasure and underestimating the pain they bring, we stay attached to them regardless of what, in an ultimate sense, we understand them to be.From: The Integrity of Emptiness by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:Sometimes you hear that the Buddha's teaching on not-self is a teaching on non-ego. This is actually a misunderstanding and it has two unfortunate consequences. The first is that, for those who like the idea of non-ego, it becomes an excuse for self-hatred and for the practice of spiritual bypassing. An example of spiritual bypassing is this: Suppose you have troubles in your life and you don't want to engage in the difficult business of trying to become more mature in dealing with others or negotiating the conflicting desires in your own mind. Instead, you simply go and meditate, you do prostrations, you do chanting, and you hope that those practices will magically make the problems in your life go away. This is called spiritual bypassing — an unskillful way of clinging to habits and practices. As you can imagine, it's not very healthy — and not very effective. People often come back from meditation retreats and they still have the same problems they had before.From: The Ego on the Path by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

"Ajaan Fuang rarely allowed his talks to be taped, and he was even more adamant about not allowing anyone to tape his conversations. Somehow, though, the following conversation was taped with his permission. In it, he's giving advice to some of his students — young women in their late twenties and early thirties — who were being pressured by their parents to settle down, get married, and start having children. There were other occasions on which, when asked, he gave advice on how to lead a happily married life to any of his students who were planning on marriage, but it's easy to see from this discussion where his heart really lay."

The controversy, here, is not really in the quote, but in the document referred to:

"The Buddha taught that the five aggregates are a heavy burden, but if you get married, all of a sudden you have ten to worry about, and then fifteen, and then twenty. And that's not the end of the matter. As soon as a child is born, it comes down with this, then comes down with that. It's not the case that from the moment it pops out it doesn't need to take medicine, that we can just leave it alone and it'll grow day and night. Oh, all the things you have to do for it until it's grown! It starts out so small and can only lie there. Then think of what it needs until it can sit up, and then what it needs until it can stand, and then what it needs until it can walk. When was it ever an easy thing, raising a child? And that's not all. As soon as you want to lie down for a little rest, it cries. You lie down for a little bit and it cries. There's nothing wonderful about it at all." - Ajahn Fuang

"Life changes, cultures change, civilizations change, but the Dharma doesn't. It's the same Dharma now as it was during the time of the Buddha. As he said it, previous Buddhas taught the same Dharma. There's a reassurance that comes with this, that regardless of the ups and downs in life, there something steady, something of real value. There's a peculiar belief around that, there is no essence to the Dharma because the Buddha question our idea of self, and question even our sense of the world outside, that he was against any essence at all, everything was just free floating.

For people who want to make up their own Dharma, that's the thought they use to justify it. But, that's not what the Buddha said. He said, there is an essence, the essence is 'release'. And everything else has contact with that essence to the extent that it leads us to release. That's why there is true rest, that's why there is true shelter for the mind. That chant we have, says again and again, 'the world offers no shelter'. That's the world, the Dharma, however, does offer shelter..."

"He, the Blessed One, is indeed the Noble Lord, the Perfectly Enlightened One;He is impeccable in conduct and understanding, the Serene One, the Knower of the Worlds;He trains perfectly those who wish to be trained; he is Teacher of gods and men; he is Awake and Holy. "--------------------------------------------"The Dhamma is well-expounded by the Blessed One, Apparent here and now, timeless, encouraging investigation, Leading to liberation, to be experienced individually by the wise. "